Camus on Politics
The following is from Albert Camus's speech in the United States in 1946. The title of the speech was The Human Crisis. Camus's words seem relevant today, and they connect to my attempts to examine the connections between civilization, the state, and psychoanalysis.
The [...] thing to do, whenever possible, is to put politics back in its true place, a secondary one. We need not furnish the world with a political or moral gospel or catechism. The great misfortune of our time is precisely that politics pretends to provide us with a catechism, with a complete philosophy, and sometimes even with rules for loving. But the role of politics is to keep things in order, and not to regulate our inner problems. As for me, I don't know if there is any absolute. If there is one, I know that it is not of a political order. The absolute is not something that we can decide on as a whole, it's for each of us to think of individually. Each of us has the inner freedom to reflect on the meaning of the absolute. And our external relationships should allow us that freedom.
I read this, and I think about how entrenched in their political positions, some people have become incapable of seeing anything without seeing it through their political lens.
Camus's idea that "the role of politics is to keep things in order, and not to regulate our problems" strikes me as significant, but I don't know how to articulate what is significant. (Perhaps that's because I'm writing this at the end of the day when I'm tired. Perhaps I need to think about it more. Or maybe I should just let it seem significant without explaining why.)
The other part that stands out to me is at the end, "The absolute is not something that we can decide on as a whole, it's for each of us to think of individually. Each of us has the inner freedom to reflect on the meaning of the absolute. And our external relationships should allow us that freedom." This seems important because so many people seem unwilling to think their thoughts independently. Instead, people cling to the safety of groupthink.